They instantly fall into certain companionable roles: the smartest one lends an educated perspective on a topic, the most outrageous one cracks the kind of jokes she wouldn’t dare to if a man were around, the least intellectually secure one feels safe enough to ask the most rudimentary questions.

Although perhaps it is more important for a poet to be "companionable" than to dilly-dally around so much with words and stuff, more important to offer "something born of blood and emotion" (as if Stevens's poems don't contain emotion -- has Wiman read "The Death of a Soldier"?) than to write skillful and provocative poems.

Heavily built, rather sluggish in his movements, and always absorbed with some subject, he was not what is generally termed "companionable," and neither bores nor office-seekers regarded him as an amiable man.

After two years, they married and fell into the kind of companionable, happy domestic partnership that a worldly man of 43 — one whose pleasures have begun to center more on the Sunday walk through Will Rogers Park and the early dinner followed by a confection of No-Cal orange soda and ice milk for dessert than on the relentless pursuit of sexual innovation — can find in a woman a few years his junior and no longer hoping to have children.